In February 1979, Sony co-founder Masaru Ibuka walked into the office of audio engineer Nobutoshi Kihara carrying a bulky TC-D5 cassette recorder and a complaint. He was about to fly to the United States, the trip was long, and he wanted to listen to opera on the plane without lugging a machine the size of a hardback book. Kihara, the engineer Ibuka liked to call godlike for his habit of turning a hallway conversation into a working prototype almost overnight, pulled apart a Pressman, Sony’s portable recorder for reporters, stripped out the speaker and the recording head, wired in a stereo amplifier, and handed Ibuka a playback-only box to carry onto the flight. That hacked-together unit became the TPS-L2, the machine that went on sale in Japan for ¥33,000 on July 1, 1979.
The Walkman is one of those objects almost everyone over thirty vaguely remembers and almost no one remembers correctly. By every internal metric Sony tracked at the time, it was supposed to fail.
A prototype built fast, for an audience of one
Kihara was already a legend inside Sony by 1979. He had built the company’s first tape recorder, helped produce Japan’s first transistor radio, and led the team behind its early home video recorders, a run of miniaturized firsts that earned him the in-house nickname Mr. Walkman years before the Walkman existed. When Ibuka asked for a personal stereo playback machine, Kihara did not commission a study. He reached for a device Sony already sold and started soldering.
The first working unit had no speaker, and that was the point. Ibuka wanted headphones, and headphones meant the box could shrink, because it no longer had to drive a speaker loud enough to fill a room. Kihara paired it with a set of lightweight headphones weighing roughly 45 grams, a fraction of the padded over-ear cans that dominated the market and themselves a small engineering breakthrough. Ibuka took the rig on his flight, came back, and told chairman Akio Morita the company had to sell it.
Morita agreed almost immediately. Most of the rest of Sony did not.
The internal fight nobody outside Sony saw
The marketing department’s objection was simple: a tape player that could not record was not a product. Every successful portable cassette device sold up to that point recorded as well as played back, and removing the record head removed the feature people thought they were paying for. The sales team forecast 5,000 units a month and considered that optimistic. Many retailers agreed with them, doubting a record-less cassette machine had any future at all.
Morita overruled the doubters. He named the device the Walkman in Japan, a piece of broken English the international division disliked so intensely it tried to rebrand the machine the Soundabout in the United States, the Stowaway in the United Kingdom, and the Freestyle in Australia and Sweden. Within a couple of years all of those names were quietly dropped, because Walkman was what customers had started calling it anyway.
It was, in hindsight, one of the more expensive corrections in branding history that never had to be paid for. The wasei-eigo name Sony’s own executives were embarrassed by became one of the most valuable consumer-electronics words of the century.
A launch with almost no advertising
Sony spent almost nothing on conventional advertising for the Japanese launch. Television spots were minimal. Instead the company sent young staff into Tokyo’s Yoyogi Park on Sundays through the summer of 1979 with Walkmans clipped to their belts and headphones over their ears, walking up to strangers and offering them a listen. The plan was crude and it worked. Magazines started writing about the strange foreign-named gadget that turned a public park into a private soundtrack, and the device sold through its initial production run of 30,000 units inside the first two months, blowing past the 5,000-a-month forecast the sales team had called optimistic.
The original TPS-L2 was unusual in another way. It had two headphone jacks, not one, because Morita worried that listening alone in public would feel antisocial. A small orange “hotline” button on the front muted the music and switched on a built-in microphone so two people sharing the headphones could talk to each other without taking them off. The feature is preserved in museum examples of the machine, and it was removed within a few model generations once it became clear that the entire appeal of the device was, in fact, listening alone.
That single design decision, two jacks shrinking to one, is the whole cultural story of the Walkman in miniature. Sony built it for company and the world used it for solitude.
The behaviour the Walkman invented
Before July 1979, listening to recorded music in public, while walking, on a train, in a park, was not something most people did. The Walkman invented it. The habit spread fast enough that by 1986 the word “Walkman” had entered the Oxford English Dictionary as a common noun, and in several languages it became a generic term for any personal stereo, regardless of maker.
The cultural footprint outran the hardware. Cassette tapes outsold vinyl records for the first time in 1983, partly on the back of the private-listening habit the Walkman normalized. Academics coined the phrase “the Walkman effect” to describe how a person wearing headphones could wall off a private acoustic space inside a crowded public one, a small act of secession that felt novel in 1980 and is now so ordinary it is invisible.
Sony, for its part, kept the line moving. Within ten years of the 1979 release, 50 million units had been sold, and the design shrank with almost every generation. The 1981 WM-2 moved the tape head into the lid to slim the body. The format then jumped media without ever abandoning the original idea: a private audio bubble carried on the body.
From the Pressman to the modern pocket
The line from Kihara’s bench to the device in your pocket runs almost too neatly. The Walkman normalized body-worn audio. The Discman, launched in 1984, moved it to digital media on a spinning disc. The iPod, released in October 2001, replaced the disc with a hard drive, and Steve Jobs has been widely reported to have studied the Walkman closely while shaping it.
Then the iPhone, announced in January 2007 and released that June, swallowed the iPod whole and folded it into a phone. Each generation kept the form factor closer to the body and the catalog larger, until the descendant of a machine built to play a single opera cassette could hold every recording ever made.
Kihara, who had imagined joggers wearing his prototypes before joggers wore anything of the kind, did not design any of that. He designed the first link in the chain and then watched the chain extend for three more decades.
What happened to the people who built it
Kihara died in 2011, at 84, after a career credited with more than 300 patents and the technical foundations of Sony’s audio and video business. Ibuka died in 1997. Morita died in 1999, six years after a stroke felled him during a game of tennis in 1993. The TPS-L2 itself is now a collector’s item and a museum piece; clean working units in their original blue-and-silver casing trade for several hundred dollars on auction sites.
The TPS-L2 weighed 390 grams, ran a few hours on two AA batteries, and could connect to nothing except a pair of headphones. It was the smallest, simplest, most single-purpose machine Sony had ever shipped. Ibuka used his on the flight home from New York that summer, the cabin lights down, the engines droning, opera coming through 45 grams of foam pressed to his ears, and somewhere over the Pacific the shape of the next forty years of consumer electronics was already settled.
